Hayes Biggs

Piano

Composer's Note:

Prelude & Freund’s Fuguing Tune in E (Noch einmal nach Bach) was composed in 2012 in honor of the 65th birthday of Don Freund, who was my first composition teacher. The subtitle comes, initially, via George Rochberg, whose Nach Bach (“after Bach”), a solo work for harpsichord or piano, is one that Don encouraged me to look at during our lessons together. At the time I was writing a work for, of all things, oboe, harpsichord and guitar, and was also quite fascinated at the time with Lukas Foss’s Baroque Variations. Like Don (and quite a few other composers active in the 1970s), I was increasingly intrigued by the ways in which one might convincingly make reference to earlier music, either through quotation or allusion. Nach Bach seamlessly embeds fragments of actual music by Bach into Rochberg’s (at the time) non-tonal harmonic idiom, one of my first inklings of how such integration could occur. Years later, Don wrote a very lovely work for violin and piano entitled Sonapartita, subtitled Noch nach Bach, (“still after Bach”), which in turn provided me with my subtitle, which translates roughly as “once more after Bach.”

J. S. Bach’s name came up a lot in our lessons, and Don’s profound engagement with Bach’s œuvre had and continues to have a powerful effect on the way I think about and experience that music. I could cite numerous other instances in Don’s pieces where he either quotes directly from or alludes to Bach: Triomusic, Offering, quite a number of passages in PASSION with Tropes—the list goes on. More recently of course, Don has been obsessed with playing, recording and lecturing on Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and is now heavily involved in memorizing Book II. All of these factors made it clear to me that a prelude and fugue would be the genre of choice for this birthday Festschrift. I was very happy to travel to Bloomington, Indiana for its premiere, which Don gave in Auer Concert Hall at Indiana University on January 18, 2014. I felt especially honored to be on a program that also included two of Don’s Piano Preludes (into darkness, 2012 and plight of the honey bee, 2013), as well as the last eight Preludes and Fugues from WTC, Book II.

My prelude and fugue are inspired by what Don refers to as “a composer’s approach” to The Well-Tempered Clavier, and the marvelous way this music that he has known and loved for so much of his life sings and dances in his dedicated and capable hands, guided as they are by his deep love for and keen understanding of these works. Besides a supple and subtle view of tempo fluctuations, inspired, perhaps, by the example of a generation of harpsichordists who have come of age during the era of historically informed performance, he often employs extra octave doublings (“4-foot sound,” in organists’ parlance) to highlight individual treble lines as well as using the resources of the modern piano, most notably the sostenuto pedal, to achieve clear, crystalline textures above organ-like pedal points in the bass. My prelude and fugue both make extensive use of the sostenuto pedal in this manner, so it is crucial that the instrument on which they are played be equipped with a fully functioning one.

Prelude & Freund’s Fuguing Tune in E is very loosely modeled on the E-Flat Major Prelude and Fugue from WTC, Book I, which consists of an expansive first part that is considerably longer and more serious than the much briefer and—in all candor—rather delightfully flip and irreverent fugue that follows. My prelude begins maestoso (perhaps veering towards pomposo) and ultimately winds up going to some much darker and somewhat blues-tinged places by its conclusion. The three-voice fugue employs a subject built on the interval of a perfect fourth, derived from a melodic line I had used years ago in a setting of Psalm 23 for soprano and piano. It proceeds in the manner and tempo of a gigue. While it is in general somewhat closer to Bach’s own harmonic practice than the Prelude, it moves to more distant tonal areas than would be the norm for Bach. Just before the final statement of the subject, a passage emerges from the texture that exploits even more nebulous harmonic territory, including some rather unhinged sounding diminished seventh chords; in the score I describe the intended affect of this passage as “numb, disembodied, disconnected.”

The pianist Simone Dinnerstein, when asked how she came up with the title of her wonderful recording, Bach: A Strange Beauty, quoted the English essayist and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626): “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

Don taught me to savor this strangeness, those less decorous, grittier aspects of Bach’s art that coexist—often uneasily, seemingly incongruously—with the absolute sureness and brilliance of his contrapuntal, harmonic and formal ingenuity. For this and everything else Don (and Bach) imparted to me, I remain grateful.